10
The Reunion
My mother had plenty to think about on the 37-hour flight to Melbourne. When the journey started she was focused on a joyful reunion, but as time went on and she thought about the situation, the emotions turned into anxiety and trepidation. What had happened to her husband? She’d heard nothing from him for five gruelling weeks, other than what he’d said on the phone on Christmas Eve. She didn’t yet realise he’d had a breakdown. Her mind was turning over and over: if it was about Sheila, he could have asked for a divorce; if it was financial, it could have been resolved. The words my father had said on the phone during his first trip to Miami had been ringing in her ears ever since his disappearance: ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ What was the ‘it’ that had brought them to this bizarre turn of events?
In her rush to get out of the house and onto a plane, my mother had forgotten to pack comfortable shoes for the journey, and now her legs were swelling inside the knee-high boots she was wearing. She couldn’t take the boots off because she’d never get them on again. It was an uncomfortable journey all round. She was travelling with Paul Hopkins and Bill Lovelace of the Daily Express, whose offer she had no choice but to accept because my father had wiped out their joint bank account. She ran a public relations business from home with the help of her fantastic secretary, Margaret Picco, but there wasn’t enough money in that account to pay for her expenses now. People would criticise her for accepting financial help from the press, but she had household expenses and a fourteen-year-old son to think about. She was exhausted by the time the plane touched down at Tullamarine Airport. Much to her relief, the only reporter there was the local ‘stringer’ for the Daily Express, Peter Game. He was with his wife, Betty, and mother-in-law, and the British Vice-Consul, Ivor Vincent, was there too, with his wife. The three ladies hugged my mother, which was a welcome display of warmth and comfort, although it made my mother weepy. Nobody seemed to notice she could hardly walk on her swollen legs inside the tight boots. The Vincents and Games both offered to put my mother up in their homes, but she opted for the motel Peter had arranged, as the next few days were going to be difficult for her emotionally, and an impersonal hotel room would at least give her a chance to relax from time to time. She and the reporters booked into the motel under their assumed names, and almost as soon as she’d unpacked the phone rang. It was Bob Gillespie of the Australian police, offering to pick her up and take her to the detention centre. My mother was surprised. ‘You mean I can actually see him today?’ she asked. ‘Yes, of course,’ said Bob. My mother said she needed a bath and a couple of hours sleep, after which they’d go and meet my father.
He’d spent Christmas Day in a sparsely furnished cell behind a security fence and barbed wire at the Maribyrnong Detention Centre, waiting for the courts to open on Boxing Day, when he’d face the charge of illegal immigration. Although his possessions had been taken away, including his washbag – so he couldn’t comb his hair or shave, he’d been allowed to keep his radio. He listened to music and waited for the news to come on. Ironically, one of his guards was a Mauritian who’d immigrated to Australia and remembered, when he was a sergeant in the Mauritius Police Force, guarding my father at Le Reduit, the Government House, when my father was undersecretary of state for the colonies.*
My mother was driven past a large group of waiting reporters, photographers and TV crews and through the entrance gates of the detention centre. A chill went down her spine. It was just like a prison, with guards all around, and the last place she’d imagined meeting her husband. ‘But it was better than a morgue,’ she told herself, ‘and he won’t want you looking glum so you’d better cheer up.’ She had one overriding thought in her mind – how would she be greeted by the man who apparently wanted her to believe he was dead? She found the situation horrifying, and for every step she took forward she wanted to take two back. It was only because Bob Gillespie was guiding her along by the arm that she moved forward. On the journey there she’d been reassured that he was ‘tanned and well’ but the police didn’t know the old John Stonehouse, only this new one, so when she saw him she was shocked. He looked dreadful. His complexion was ashen and his eyes glazed but wild. He’d lost a stone, aged years, his hair was turning grey, and his voice was strangely high-pitched. His demeanour was confused and deflated, almost sheepish, and quite unlike the confident, self-assured man she knew. She was facing a broken man, but he looked pleased to see her, and they kissed warmly in the reception area under the full gaze of the prison officers and policemen.
Her first words to him were, ‘what have you been up to?’ He put his arm around her shoulder and replied, ‘It’s a long story, I’ll explain.’ She was introduced to his lawyer, James (Jim) Patterson, and his assistant, Fran, and they were ushered into a bleak interview room, sparsely furnished with one table and a few chairs. My parents just looked at each other for a while, my mother’s head spinning with questions. They were both nervous, and at pains not to upset each other on this first meeting. Too much pain and agony had been suffered on both sides and it was as if they were both treading on ice – at any moment it could crack and they’d be drowned in their own grief. But my mother had things to say. He’d allowed her and the family to think he was dead for five weeks, and then had the audacity to ask her to bring his mistress with her. She’d told him before that another affair would be the end of their marriage. For five minutes she told him how cruel he’d been to casually abandon four children, allowing us and her to suffer the grief of believing him to be dead when he was very much alive, plus leaving her to deal with all the problems he’d left behind. He’d just expected us to get on without him as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do to a close and loving family. Then he just broke down and cried and cried. My mother had to hug him and try to comfort him as he sobbed his heart out. As she tried to soothe him, my mother realised for the first time that he must be really ill – she had never seen him react to any situation in anything close to this manner. At that point she realised she was dealing with a nervous breakdown and would have to stop thinking about herself and start thinking about him. As they talked, she came to see that he was in a state of shock. He’d been living in another persona and was finding it hard to readjust to being John Stonehouse again. My mother hugged him and kissed him and told him we were all so happy he was alive.
My mother turned to Jim Patterson and said, ‘You may think that John is well and healthy, but this is not the John I know. He has clearly had some kind of breakdown and needs psychiatric help.’ There was a knock on the door, and the meeting was brought to an end. My mother would be in Australia for three weeks before returning to London, and then returning to Melbourne again for a second time. My brother Mathew would spend months there, as would my sister Jane, and they would all have hands-on experience of my father’s ongoing breakdown. He’d be listless and wouldn’t want to do anything, sitting around in his dressing gown all day. They never knew what to expect. One minute he’d be curled up in a ball on the sofa and the next, in a fighting mood. My father’s mental state became the family’s priority, the entire focus was to get him through this experience without additional pressure. The fear within the family was that he’d commit suicide. His mental state needed gentle care and attention now, everything else could wait. In public, his pride forced him to appear compos mentis, but in private he was a wreck.
On Boxing Day my father appeared in court, where a transcript of the police interview taken immediately after his arrest was read out. Much of it described the problems with the BBT and the financial difficulties my father had got into trying to prop it up. In the witness box he said: ‘I was being blackmailed and felt I had no escape,’ and ‘I don’t want to say anything here or apportion blame. Some of the responsibility was my own.’ He wanted to stay in Australia, he said, and start a new life, adding, ‘I can only say in the past two days I have received more consideration, understanding and support than in the past two years in England.’ There
were no charges against him in the UK but while the Australian labour and immigration minister, Clyde Cameron, decided whether he was to be deported as an illegal immigrant or not, my father was sent back to the detention centre.
On the 27th December a photo of my parents kissing at the door of the Maribyrnong Detention Centre was on the front page of the Daily Express, with a large caption: ‘The kiss of forgiveness’. The banner headline read: ‘Exclusive: John Stonehouse tells the Express “WHY I CAME TO HATE ENGLAND”’. I doubt anyone back in England had sympathy with that, coming from a man who’d faked his own death, abandoned his wife and children, had an affair with his secretary, stolen lots of money from who-knew-who but someone, was a spy for the commies, or the CIA, had left his constituents to fend for themselves while taking his salary, and had something to do with the Mafia. It didn’t really matter that he said, ‘I was being blackmailed by men who threatened to use my political career to squeeze me dry.’1 Nobody was interested. They just wanted to know about the affair, which Sheila was still denying. That same day, on page two of the Daily Mail, a headline read, ‘I’ll fly out if he wants’, with Sheila reportedly saying: ‘At the moment I am continuing to look after his parliamentary work. I will remain totally loyal to him.’2
But the big headline on the front page of that Daily Mail was the real breaking story, possibly the most damaging in this entire saga: ‘CAPTURED IN A DEAD MAN’S SHOES’. When Mrs Mildoon and Mrs Markham discovered their husbands’ identities had been used by my father, the whole country took a sharp intake of breath: this was the final straw. From that point, I doubt there was a person in the country who had a good word to say about him, and trying to recover any semblance of understanding was going to be a long uphill struggle for my father, towards a summit he would never reach.
In London, my sisters, brother and I were shocked by what we were reading in the papers. The Daily Mail had five pages of coverage that day, plus an editorial, headed: ‘Surprise! Surprise! John Stonehouse Lives’, in which they congratulated themselves on being dogged in their pursuit of dirt: ‘Some lines of inquiry caused undoubted distress to the relatives of Mr Stonehouse. But the instincts of the press have from first to last in this affair been sound. We believed that, for his own bizarre reasons, John Stonehouse had contrived to vanish. And we were right.’3 On page three, there was a map of the world with arrows showing little aeroplanes flying from London to Miami, to Hawaii, to Australia, to Singapore, to Denmark and back to Australia. From this graphic, complete with a man swimming off the coast of Miami, and a passport in the name of Markham, we learned some of what had been going on. One mystery was that he’d been receiving mail. The press had certainly been doing their homework or, more likely, the police had been handing the press a lot of information.
By the 28th December, four days after his arrest, the British were baying for blood and parliament needed to look as if it was ‘doing something’. On the front page, the Daily Mail headline ran ‘YARD READY TO FLY STONEHOUSE HOME’: ‘It is believed that he can be brought back for obtaining the forged passport in Markham’s name – an offence he has already clearly admitted and which carries a maximum penalty of two years’ jail.’ The police had already been making enquiries at my father’s offices during December and no criminal charges had been brought. But now they had the Markham bank accounts to look into, and they were gearing themselves up for a heroic extraction of the fugitive. The Daily Mail reported: ‘Two officers are to be briefed to stand by ready to fly to Australia at short notice if he is not deported and extradition becomes necessary.’4 Alongside the story, in case we’d forgotten the love triangle, they had a picture of a smiling Sheila with the heading ‘Blackmail? Well, massive pressure’. She is reported as saying ‘massive, unfair pressure was being put on him. I know who was doing it. There were several of them. But I won’t go into details until I have spoken to John.’ My mother was quoted as saying, ‘It’s the problems of a man in public life who goes into business, comes up against lots of pressure in business, and then people put pressure on him because of his political career.’5
At 2am on the 29th December my father was suddenly released from detention and told he could report weekly to the Melbourne authorities while the Australian government decided on their course of action. Away from the eyes of the press, the police took him 40 miles east to Yellingbo, and the home of his old school friend from Southampton, Griff Bartlett, who’d come forward and volunteered to look after him. As teenagers, they’d both been involved in an idealistic organisation called ‘Citizens of Tomorrow’. Now Griff was living with his partner, Lettie Doolan, in a huge ramshackle house set in ten acres of a fauna reserve. The next day he phoned my mother and arranged to meet her in the Mentone district of Melbourne. My mother was taken there by the two Daily Express reporters she’d travelled to Australia with and who, for their own advantage as well as hers, had been helping her avoid the rest of the press pack. Dusk was falling by the time my father arrived at the rendezvous, an hour late, and reluctantly agreed to have his photo taken – part of the deal my mother had struck with the Express for getting her to Australia on Christmas Day. With the help of a flash, Bill took a photo of them on a nearby beach, with their arms around each other and looking out to the sea. The reporters promised not to follow my parents, and my mother got into the front of a car driven by Lettie, with my father in the back. Even though it was an awkward position, my mother bent her hand backwards over the seat and my father held it all the way.
When they arrived at Griff and Lettie’s house, my mother was very surprised to walk through the front door and into a huge ballroom, large enough for several hundred people, with a grand staircase at the end leading to a stage, with a modern organ on it. But the grandeur was faded, and in stark contrast to the amenities of the house which were bare and minimal – no running water or internal sewerage system. Griff and Lettie were great friends to my parents during the next six months’ ordeal, helping in any way they could in between looking after several children, many animals, Lettie’s full-time job in Melbourne as a printer and union rep, Griff’s job as an architect, and them both being volunteer firefighters. In the early morning, my mother heard the sound of bells and was told those were bellbirds which, along with the cockatoos and parakeets, and a wonderful environment of tall blue gum trees, provided my parents with welcome distractions on the long walks they now had the opportunity to share together.
Finally, they could talk. My father said, ‘I thought it would be better for all of you if I were dead. The companies would have received the sympathy of the banks and others and would’ve been able to carry on and all the staff safeguarded. I couldn’t bear the thought of the family seeing me go through the public humiliation of failure. In time you would have forgotten me and rebuilt your lives. I wanted to be rid of the sham of that VIP nonsense and be treated like anyone else. I’ve been blackmailed, abused and beleaguered financially just because I am who I am. I can’t go on like that any longer.’ To my mother, who was sane, the answer to his problems seemed simple enough: wind down the businesses and get out of politics. But to my father, who was insane, faking his death, or suicide, seemed rational solutions. I wonder how many men have killed themselves thinking ‘it would be better’ for their family and colleagues if they were dead? Irrationality leads to dangerous fantasies and wild expedients. As my parents walked and talked, my father broke into tears, and my mother became desperately miserable. By far the worst thing for her was realising that despite their tremendous relationship he’d felt unable to confide in her in London. When she asked about Sheila, all he could say was, ‘Barbara, I love you and I love the children and I don’t want to do anything to hurt you.’
He talked about his time in Melbourne, but couldn’t yet talk about the days he spent in Copenhagen. That would have to wait until he’d seen the psychiatrist a few times, when the internal power struggle between the old personality of John Stonehouse and the new one of Joseph Markham was explored. Th
e five days he spent alone in Copenhagen had been agonising as he tried to sort himself out, separating one identity from the other. On day six, he’d reached out for help and phoned Sheila. It was good that my mother had Griff Bartlett in Melbourne, because he was the only person there who’d known my father before the breakdown and could see how different he was. Other people thought my father was behaving normally, and that was a large part of his problem – they couldn’t recognise the degree of his mental collapse.
As 1974 drew to a close, the Stonehouse story provided more twists and turns. Everyone wanted to know who had been sending my father letters in Melbourne. Sheila was the chief suspect, but wasn’t named. On the 30th December the Daily Mail had a story headed ‘Yard hunts for a fellow plotter’, while the front page of the Daily Mirror was taken with ‘RIDDLE OF CALLS BY STONEHOUSE’. The very fact that my father had been in communication with someone led the entire nation, whipped up by the press, to believe the whole scenario – the disappearance – was a contrived plot. It didn’t occur to anyone that he was, in his desperate mental state, reaching out for help. That would have been the generous route to take but, as we were to learn, Britain was in no mood for generosity. On the last day of a horrible year, the newspapers were focused on the letters and phone calls, the life insurance, and the fact that Peter Shore, the secretary for trade, had ordered an inquiry into my father’s business affairs.
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 12
